How the Four-Day Workweek Can Help You Win the War for Talent

Andrew Barnes, the founder of Perpetual Guardian, an estate planning firm in New Zealand, made the four-day workweek a permanent policy at his business in 2018. The following year he published a white paper extolling the benefits of the shorter workweek. At the time, his vision seemed a pipe dream, extremely noble but highly implausible. 

Every visionary must stand alone. Initially.

Now employees and employers, governments and businesses are lining up behind Andrew, embracing his enthusiasm for a shorter workweek. With the increased focus on employee well-being, on attracting and retaining talent (without breaking the bank), and on the need to evaluate employees on performance rather than attendance, the timeline to the four-day workweek has become, well, shorter.

“Whoever cracks the four-day workweek,” says Marta Riggins, employer brand and employee engagement strategic consultant, “is going to win the talent war, because that’s going to be the new in-demand perk.”

In LinkedIn’s recent Global Talent Trends report, we focused on the reinvention of company culture, with particular attention to flexibility and well-being. Read on to see how the shorter workweek can help with both. 

A shorter workweek can help smaller and less affluent companies compete for talent

Organizations shouldn’t draw the conclusion that the four-day workweek is a luxury available only to the richest and most powerful businesses. To the contrary, it can be a strategic lever pulled by smaller or more lightly resourced companies.

“Rather than trying to win the war for talent by increasing compensation,” the Harvard Business Review noted recently, “we are seeing some employers reduce the number of hours worked by employees and keeping compensation flat. . . [This] gives less liquid employers a better chance to compete with organizations that offer higher overall compensation but don’t offer reduced hours.”

Think about it: Research done last year by LinkedIn found that more job seekers (63%) said work-life balance was a top priority when considering a new role than those (60%) who said excellent compensation and benefits.

Research shows shorter hours can reduce burnout and increase well-being and productivity

The move to a shorter workweek is not a rash or impulsive one. Governments and businesses alike have brought in top academic researchers and their own analysts to study the impact of working fewer hours.

The results? Employees are equally or more productive (phew!) and way more engaged and happy (no surprise). 

From 2015 to 2019, Iceland ran what has been hailed as the “world’s largest trial” of the shorter workweek. The study looked at 2,500 employees of the Reykjavík City Council and the Icelandic national government. Government workers had their hours reduced from 40 to either 35 or 36 hours a week. And the results were notable given the current concerns about employee well-being: Perceived stress and burnout fell while well-being improved. Productivity stayed level or even improved across the many teams that participated.

Andrew Barnes didn’t make the shorter week a fixture at Perpetual Guardian until he had run a two-month trial in early 2018 that was tracked by two researchers. One of those researchers, Jarrod Haar, a human resources management professor at Auckland University of Technology, reported no drop-off in productivity and an increase from 54% to 78% in employees who said they were managing work-life balance well. 

The United Kingdom will start a six-month trial with the shorter workweek in June, and 30 companies have already raised their hand to participate. Researchers from Oxford, Cambridge, and Boston College will look at the impact of a 32-hour workweek on productivity and well-being as well as gender equity and the environment. (The potential environmental benefits range from reduced paper and electrical usage to fewer commuters on the roads.) Spain launched a three-year, US$60 million trial in September 2021; Scotland began an experiment with it in January 2022.

But you don’t have to have a national government behind you to see how it might work for your company. Unilever is trying it out in New Zealand, Shopify in Canada, and Panasonic all over the world. Other companies — including Bolt, Shake Shack, and Kickstarter in the United States, Software Delsol in Spain, CIB Group in Germany, Atom Bank in the United Kingdom, and Panasonic in Japan — have committed to the shorter week at full salaries.

A shorter workweek forces companies to rethink the number and length of meetings

The early experiments with the four-day workweek have driven organizations to look closely at how employees spend time. Andrew Barnes originally experimented with the shorter workweek after reading a report that the average worker spends less than three hours of their workday productively. His team at Perpetual Guardian found they saved time by automating formerly manual processes and by including agendas for every meeting. 

But the biggest time savings at Perpetual Guardian — and seemingly every other company or country that has rolled out a shorter workweek — came from cutting the number of meetings and reducing the lengths of the remaining ones. At Perpetual Guardian, employees cut standing one-hour meetings to 30 minutes, with no perceived loss of value or output.

“They worked out where they were wasting time and worked smarter, not harder,” Jarrod Haar said. When Microsoft Japan experimented with a four-day workweek in 2019, they found an extraordinary 40% boost in productivity, in part from rethinking the number and length of meetings.

There is an adage called Parkinson’s law that says, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” So, maybe the greatest efficiency hack is simply to reduce the workday or the workweek.

“[T]he four-day week is already here for most companies,” says Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of Shorter, a book about the shorter workweek. “It’s buried under a whole bunch of rubble of outmoded practices and bad meetings. Once you clear that stuff away, then it turns out the four-day week is well within your grasp.”

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